The former Governor of California opens up about his wife's attempt to make him cancel his participation in the 2003 election.

Photo credit: Owen Beiny/WENN

As Arnold Schwarzenegger's new book "Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story" is coming closer to its release date, excerpt from the memoir is released. In one of the chapters in the book, he revisits the days leading to his running for Governor of California in 2003.

The former body builder claims his wife Maria Shriver tried to persuade him to cancel his decision to participate in the Governor election. She later gave her blessings after she was chastised by her mother, Eunice, when she told her about her attempt to block his political ambitions.

Eunice warned her daughter that he would be "angry for the rest of his life" if he was stopped. Maria then helped him prepare announcement of his candidacy on "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno". She gave him two papers of what he should have talked about: one if he decided to run and another if he canceled it.

In the 624-page tome, Arnie doesn't talk about his affair with his married housekeeper Mildred Baena until near the end of the book. He remembers he had sex with her in 1996 while Shriver vacationed with their kids and he was left behind in Hollywood to film "Batman & Robin".

He lived in denial for years, trying to convince himself that the boy Mildred gave birth to after their affair was not his. "Instead of doing the right thing, I'd just put the truth in a mental compartment and locked it up where I didn't deal with it every day," he says.

Long before they were separated, Arnie was often confronted by Maria about the boy who looked more and more like him as he grew older. The USC think tank guru always denied it until they met a therapist one day after he stepped down from his position as a Governor.

"The minute we sat down, the therapist turned to me and said, 'Maria wanted to come here today and to ask about a child - whether you fathered a child with your housekeeper Mildred' I told the therapist, 'It's true'," he recalls.

Although they are no longer together, the "Terminator" actor still has high hope that he will reconcile with Maria one day. "You can call this denial," he writes, "but it's the way my mind works."